Copyright: ©2020 Adelson Galleries, Inc.
All images Copyright: ©2020 Jamie Wyeth (unlessotherwisestated)
Many thanks to Mary Beth Dolan for all her efforts on this exhibition and catalogue.
Cover: Jamie Wyeth, PumpkinShadow, 1977
By Elliot Bostwick Davis, Ph.D. with contributions by Warren and Adam Adelson
October 21, 2020 – April 21, 2021
New York The Fuller Building • 595 Madison Avenue, 4th Fl • New York, NY, 10022 • (212) 439-6800
Palm Beach 318 Worth Avenue • Palm Beach, FL 33480 • (561) 720-2079 www.adelsongalleries.com
I met the Wyeth family in the spring of 1974. I had come from Boston to New York in 1972 to join Knoedler Gallery. After a year, I left Knoedler when my friend Jack Tanzer introduced me to Fred Woolworth, who asked me to join him at Coe Kerr Gallery, which coincidently was a spinoff of Knoedler. Mr. E. Coe Kerr had been president of Knoedler and left the company in 1968 to form his own shop with his friend Fred Woolworth. Coe died precipitously, and Fred was looking for a replacement. I felt I wasn’t qualified to fill Coe’s shoes at age 32, but I was available. After all, Coe had “discovered” Andrew Wyeth in the mid 1940s, and had taken him into Knoedler with great success over 25 years. On our meeting, Fred said to me, “I will look after Andy, and you will look after Jamie.” I took the job.
I had done exhibitions at Adelson Gallery, which I had started in Boston in 1965, and had organized shows at Knoedler for the one year that I was there, so taking on a Jamie Wyeth exhibition immediately at Coe Kerr in 1974 was within my range of experience. There were 16 oils, of which only six were for sale. We borrowed ten including the stately depiction of Paul Mellon from the sitter, a striking portrait of Jean Kennedy Smith from her, and remarkable “portraits” of the artist’s animals; his huge canvas of Den Den, his 800 pound pet pig; and his dog Boom Boom a massive Newfoundland. Of the six pictures for sale, “Angus,” a closeup portrait of black cattle, painted from the back of a pickup truck, was on the cover. We sent out catalogs, and a guy about my age from Denver walked in and bought Angus for $30,000. I bought the large charcoal study for $4,000, payable over six months. My son Alan has it hanging in his living room today.
A year or two later, Jamie was painting a portrait of Andy Warhol at the Factory downtown. The painting inspired the exhibition, “Portraits of Each Other: Jamie Wyeth and Andy Warhol,” in the spring of 1976. The exhibition included a dozen large and small gouache paintings of Andy by Jamie, and the four Warhol paintings plus about a dozen big graphite drawings he did of Jamie. We did a brochure, which served as a mailing piece that reproduced the pictures, and a brief dialogue between Andy and Jamie, which I wrote. We opened on June 3, and there were hundreds of people that showed up. There was a line around to Madison Avenue of people waiting to get in. The opening was wonderful, though at one point Fred Woolworth wondered if the second floor was going to collapse. It wasn’t our usual group; people were jammed on the stairways, and there were some in costumes, and some in drag. Plus
of course our usual “straight” audience, which included society ladies and movie stars mixed in with the downtown hoard. It was great fun, to say the least.
The New York Times had a half page full of candid photos and a juicy story with the marvelous bit, “At the exhibition, Warhol learned that the show was already a success with some half of the works having already been sold. Always good for an incisive and memorable comment, Warhol said, ‘I think it’s because Jamie looks like a soup can.’”
Leaping forward almost 40 years, my wife Jan and I had a dinner party at our home in Westchester, New York and had invited many friends from Boston, including Elliot Davis, then the head of Arts of the Americas at the MFA, Boston. I knew Elliot and admired her work in Boston. The subject of Jamie Wyeth was on our minds, and we discussed the fact that Jamie would be 70 years old in a few years, and there had not ever been a major retrospective of his work. We agreed the time had come, and Elliot leapt on it. Over the next years, Elliot saw every scrap of paper and canvas that the artist had ever touched. She put together a group of works and objects to define and explain the artist’s vision in a comprehensive view of his ever-evolving aesthetic.
The exhibition “Jamie Wyeth” at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston opened in 2014, and was an unqualified success in the press, and it drew a record-breaking audience, appealing to a broad range of people in age and experience. It traveled to three venues: The Brandywine River Museum, San Antonio Museum of Art, and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. Throughout the exhibition the response was enthusiastic; the audience saw, some for the first time, the breadth and talent of the artist.
About a year ago my friend and colleague Frank Fowler said that a longtime client of ours had decided to sell their collection of 11 Jamie Wyeths. They had been buying Jamie’s paintings steadily for over four decades. We thought to supplement this collection with earlier, later, and other works, but keep the focus of non-figurative subject matter. We invited Elliot Davis to lend her critical eye to the project, and she has produced the incisive and brilliant essay herein. The last “for sale” show at Adelson Galleries of Jamie’s work was “Seven Deadly Sins” in spring of 2008. We are especially pleased to offer our audience “Pumpkin Shadow,” an exhibition of 22 special paintings which span six decades of Jamie Wyeth’s peerless body of work.•
Jamie sketching at the Great Wall of China, April 2012
As with any compelling artist, new discoveries and nuances emerge with the benefit of time and reflection. Revisiting and rethinking an artist’s vision with fresh eyes, considering recent directions, and the ability to offer context from broader life experience, is a gift. I am grateful to the Adelson family for championing of Jamie Wyeth’s work during his 2014 retrospective at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and for inviting me, six years later, to write about the current selection of paintings inspired by their collaboration with dedicated connoisseurs of the artist’s work over the course of several decades.
One of the most striking features of Wyeth’s artistic voice is his remarkable ability to create startling contrasts within a single composition. In the 2014 catalogue accompanying the JamieWyeth exhibition, I proposed that his best works derived from the energy generated between polar opposites in the various worlds he inhabits. I One pole is firmly established in the Brandywine River Valley, where he was born in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania and still lives nearby on Point Lookout Farm, which stretches into nearby Delaware. The other pole is on Maine’s Mid coast, where he lives on Southern Island, nearer to shore, and, during parts of the year, on Monhegan Island, ten miles out to sea. Close personal relationships beyond his family added new dimensions to his art over the years: a major mentor in Lincoln Kirstein; lifelong friendships with various members of the Kennedy family; immersion in Andy Warhol’s Factory beginning in the 1970s; intense study over 18 months of Rudolf Nureyev; and a journey following the footsteps of Rockwell Kent to Monhegan, where Wyeth inhabits a home built by Kent for his mother and surrounds himself with
Kent’s early paintings made on the island. All of these figures became important stars in his universe and artistic practice, while family members, especially his parents, Andrew and Betsy Wyeth, and his wife Phyllis Mills Wyeth, exerted powerful gravitational pull to his artistic path.
What is especially intriguing about this selection of paintings is that none of the human sitters mentioned above is present—at least directly, as we shall see. This group of works stars everyday objects and creatures found on land, sea, or in the air that surrounds Wyeth. He paints what he knows, and, we discover, he knows these animate and inanimate sitters intimately, over time, and in many different settings. Spanning more than 60 years of Wyeth’s artistic practice, the group opens with his early watercolor, AppleBags, 1962 (Cat. 1), a warm autumn scene of harvesting the fruits of farmers’ labors, a pursuit that may have intrigued an aspiring sixteenyear-old roaming the countryside for subjects that would support his own life as an artist. The most recent composition in the group, Kleberg:Squirreling, 2018 (Cat. 22), reflects a vivid memory of a beloved dog, Kleberg, in a scene that reveals Wyeth casting to the wind his earlier self as expressed by the tender watercolor of his youth. Here we experience a free-wheeling explosion of his distinctive mix of media that turn the tree upside down, like an octopus of tentacles reaching in every direction above a dog splayed at its base. The two paintings are milestones of remarkable journey for any artist.
In the entire group of 22 fruits of Wyeth’s labors, we can explore his masterful ability to play out themes, techniques, and compositional formats that fascinate him, ultimately discovering how persistent reworking and rethinking favorite subjects produce even more compelling responses from his practice. Taken together, these compositions highlight his fresh and varied ability to render his chosen subjects, whether alive or painted as though they are, in all sorts of lights. We can feel on our faces the crisp and clear light of a Monhegan Island autumn day, as vividly rendered in the brilliant watercolor, PumpkinShadow, 1977 (Cat. 6), a personal favorite shown in the MFA, Boston retrospective, moist light that transports us through coastal fog, ghostly shadows in carefully-crafted wooden interiors, or hazy veils of childhood memories conjuring up the world of nursery rhymes. Wyeth continues to challenge himself, playing with paint and subject matter in the way that only mastery of a subject allows, innovating time and again his portrayal of light, the most elusive protagonist of all.
Jamie Wyeth (b. 1946) was born to a family of practicing artists, established by his grandfather, Newell Convers Wyeth (1882-1945), enriched by aunts, Henriette (1907-1997) and Carolyn (1909-1994), who also served as his early teacher, his father, Andrew (1917-2009), and many uncles and cousins who further cultivated the Wyeths’ artistic legacy. Such deep artistic heritage could easily drown young talent. Yet, early on, Jamie Wyeth was determined to forge his own path, announcing at age 11 that he was leaving school so he could dedicate himself to the studio. It was an unusual and bold choice for a young artist in 1957, supported by the significant contributions of the earlier generations of his family to American art and yet undoubtedly complicated by them, given the inherent complexities within all families.
Close to half of the works in this selection take place in interiors Wyeth regularly inhabits, whether a shed with a view onto Monhegan Island in Casket Rock, 1974 (Cat. 4), or the corner of a barn on Point Lookout Farm that we glimpse in Mousing, 1993 (Cat. 13), rendered in mixed media. In both scenes, Wyeth invites us into darkened rooms, where we discover another composition framed within a composition with an opening onto the landscape viewed outside.
In Casket Rock, a vertical window mullion boldly divides the upper composition into halves, a stroke of brilliant abstraction that effectively frames the distant view of the bulging rock in the distance resembling a burial casket. Wyeth calls our attention to the pile of lobster buoys tossed onto the floor at odd angles. As we cast our eyes to the lower edge of the sheet, we realize the horizontal window mullion has found its way into the scene with the trace of the artist’s brush forming a shadow crossed by diagonals of thinner and fainter strokes tracing the floorboards. Exploring relationships between light and dark, it is classic Wyeth at work, showing us with his brush the light we can see for ourselves in the actual window mullion, as well as the shadow cast by a mullion we cannot.
In Mousing, Wyeth places a simple pail front and center against the shallow space of a barn wall rendered in loosely-brushed dark green tones that initially camouflage a black cat, poised to hunt. He opens a metal grate for us at the left, a sliced view onto lush, acid green foliage lit from above, juxtaposing the brilliant, painterly touches used to paint leaves in nature and the sheer, deep greens of manmade, corrugated tin inside the barn. The artist plays cat and mouse with the viewer, building up
horizontals of the windowsill, the ridges and rim of the pail, and latch above the cat, and then countering them with verticals of the rippled background, the angle of the open grate, and the cat’s raised paws. Animate and inanimate objects respond to one another in Wyeth’s world. We discover the handle of the pail and the cat’s torso tilt at the same angle in hopes of capturing prey, as the hunt for a mouse causes us to become engaged in his scene found in one small corner of life on Point Lookout Farm.
Both Casket Rock and Mousing recall Andrew Wyeth’s own fascination with framing compositions within windows, a subject explored in the 2014 exhibition, Looking Out,LookingIn (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.). In classic Andrew Wyeth scenes such as Wind from the Sea, 1947 (National Gallery of Art), or Airborne, 1996 (Fig. 1), the artist focuses on ephemeral air currents we feel, but cannot see.
In a sense, Andrew Wyeth’s many scenes through windows may have served as initial inspirations for Casket Rock or Mousing in the broadest sense. Yet, since the Renaissance, when Leon Battista Alberti’s essay De Pittura published in 1435 instructed artists to use the frame of the painting as a window onto the world, painters, including the Wyeths, have exploited windows to suit their own ends.
In Jamie Wyeth’s compositions, the interiors initially bring focus to the physical world before us – a pile of buoys awaiting another lobster dory launch or a cat poised to pounce on the next unsuspecting mouse – while also opening a window to new horizons from which to consider these quotidian scenes of the world around us.
Fig.1
Andrew Wyeth, Airborne, 1996, Tempera on panel, 40 x 48 inches Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art
Copyright ©2020 Andrew Wyeth
Animals have always played a major role in Wyeth’s artistic practice, as demonstrated by his ability to paint their personalities in ways that show distinctive and seemingly human personalities. Whether painting a President, posthumously, as he did in his Portrait of JohnF.Kennedy (Fig. 2), or celebrities like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Andy Warhol, or Rudolf Nureyev that were an intense focus of his work during the 1970s and in numerous revisions he recreated from memory and imagination, Wyeth approaches his subjects with passion. He describes his method of becoming his sitters as one that is similar to an actor transforming himself into a character on stage. Inspired by mammals, sea creatures, and birds, a great focus of his work, Wyeth brings that same practice of portraying humans to bear on all of his subjects found in the broader kingdom of animals, embracing all that has life. We would be hard pressed to name a more memorable and imaginative artist of animals in our own time, as his range of remarkable compositions of creatures great and small in the collections represented here vividly demonstrate. Comparing his works with the finest animalier painters from art history, Wyeth’s intensity and dedication that he brings to bear allow his animal portraits to stand hoof to claw with the very best.
When selecting his furry and feathered subjects, Wyeth makes the most of contrasts, whether painted as the white and black feathers of the chickens suspended in Oven Stuffers, 1988 (Cat. 9), the hair of Black and White Goat, 2008 (Cat. 21), painted two decades later, both from one distinguished collection, or in the interplay of brown and white in Yolk and the Wicker Chair, 1987 (Cat. 8). Oven Stuffers dates from a period in Wyeth’s career when he produced numerous scenes of chickens and roosters strutting before or sitting inside various cardboard boxes printed with brand names
Fig.2
Jamie Wyeth, PortraitofJohnF.Kennedy, 1967, Oil on canvas, 16 x 29 inches Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
like S.O.S., Tide, 10 W 30, 1981, or Corn Flakes, 1985 (Fig. 3). This time around, he plays the black feathers off against the lighter grey tones of the barn wall, and the white feathers against darker brown tones. One chicken crouches into the belly of the scale, baring a profile surrounded by a profusion of straw, while the other stares at us with beady eyes head on, seemingly beseeching us as to whether we would really want to see this chicken with such a formidable personality on our dinner table.
We have seen this head-on stare in Oven Stuffers used repeatedly in Wyeth’s most compelling portraits; two of his most memorable sitters, HelenTaussig, 1963, and AndyWarhol, 1976 (Fig. 4), stare at the viewer with the head-on gaze of an icon. That same frontal gaze captures our attention in Black and White Goat, 2008. Filling the composition from edge to edge with the goat’s curving horns and wild coat, Wyeth relishes painting strands of black fleece that take on a life of their own as they merge together, forming the outlines of the goat’s front and hind quarters, which, in turn, frame a fluffy, white midsection.
With Wyeth’s brush, the goat’s belly becomes an imaginative display of texture and paint that is truly tantalizing, a return to his earlier painting of black-faced sheep named
Fig.4
Jamie Wyeth, PortraitofAndyWarhol, 1976, Oil on gessoed panel, 30 x 24 inches
Cheekwood Botanical Gardens and Museum of Art, Nashville, Tennessee
Fig.3
Jamie Wyeth, Corn Flakes, 1985, Watercolor and varnish on paper, 28 x 22 inches Private Collection and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art
Jamie Wyeth, PortraitofLady, 1968, Oil on canvas, 36 x 63 1/2 inches Private Collection
Lady, 1968 (Fig. 5), that he portrayed standing above the horizon of Monhegan, in a composition that was said to be a favorite of Andrew Wyeth. In Lady, the black oval shape of the sheep’s face displays two black ears jutting out to echo the horizon and yellow eyes like giant marbles fixed on us. Together they resemble a mask, detached from the profusion of curly locks painted so thickly they resemble unkempt, Rastafarian dreads. In Black and White Goat, Wyeth plays with the lighter tones pulling away from the canvas before our eyes, as the downy white fur floats freely above the dark front and hind quarters of the goat. The light midsection lifts away from the green background that Wyeth drops down like a curtain for a shallow stage to keep our attention focused on his riotous handling of what initially appears to be an ordinary black and white goat.
Threading through this selection of works are strains of Wyeth’s obsessions with the many objects he collects and types of painted decoration that surround him in his homes. We watch him painstakingly reweaving white wicker with his brush and repainting his decoratively-patterned floors in his own hand, as glimpsed in the foregrounds of Yolk and the Wicker Chair, 1987, and GullsofMonhegan,#1, 1992 (Cat. 12). Building upon the contrasts of light and dark explored a decade earlier in Oven Stuffers, the white wicker chair allows the artist to trace all manner of curlicues, balls, and twists that form its structure, creating something substantial as Wyeth bends his combined media to his vision of how simple willow branches are transformed to become wicker. The tightness of the wicker designs plays off the background and floor. We see Wyeth letting go of paint in every direction, as he drips, dabs, and swishes it broadly around the silky fur of the seated Jack Russell Terrier, named Yolk. Known for his sensitive and charming images of all kinds of dogs, but especially his own, Yolk, in Wyeth’s realm, has all the presence of a Renaissance profile portrait of a condottieri, seated on the artist’s painstakingly-crafted wicker throne.
Fig.5
Of all of the works in the featured private collection, Cow and the Cat, 1988 (Cat. 10), visibly embodies Wyeth’s fascination with animating inanimate objects and painting animals with personalities, while also revealing his love of American folk art, especially weathervanes that he collects. A metal weathervane painted to resemble a black and white Holstein cow in profile stares out with a glinting, tin eye. This single eye contrasts head-on stare of a crouching cat, facing us with golden eyes like antique glass marbles, recalling the piercing blue eyes of HelenTaussig, 1963 (Fig. 6), behind her cat eye glasses, or the yellow eyes of Lady, 1968. Although fashioned from molded tin and painted, a weathervane from Wyeth’s brush resembles a real Holstein cow, standing in profile as though waiting at a stanchion during milking time. In contrast, the thinly-painted cat gives the impression that the live animal nearby is merely a fleeting apparition. By grounding both animals on the top of a red-painted pine chest with a visible key hole worn from use, Wyeth calls attention to painting. He pushes to the front of the composition an object that is the handiwork of another artist, just as he did with painted lobster buoys in Casket Rock, inviting us to enjoy the care he lavishes on repainting the red folk art chest right before our eyes.
Ever attentive to materiality, the chest in Cow and the Cat represents one kind of wood that surrounds Wyeth inside his homes. Outside, within this group of works, we marvel at the artist’s range as he expresses qualities found in many different kinds of woods, animating the material so that we see it in a new light as it appears to take on new life. Among the earliest paintings of wood in this group is Squid, 1970 (Cat. 2), part of a series of watercolors inspired by trees on Point Lookout Farm.
Fig.6
Jamie Wyeth, PortraitofHelenTaussig, 1963, 24 3/4 x 15 3/4, Oil on canvas
Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, Baltimore, Maryland
Some resemble insects, such as Brandywine Spiders, 1970, which appeared in the MFA, Boston retrospective. In this sheet, the artist imagines a fallen branch as a giant underwater creature that starred in N.C Wyeth’s illustrations for TheMysterious Island, 1939/1940 (Fig. 7), Jules Verne’s sequel to 20,000LeaguesUnder the Sea, created in his studio nearby. Thinlypainted, bare trees in the background highlight the bleached limbs of a fallen branch that appears, incongruously, to be swimming. An oval hollow transformed into an eye just where the branches fan out to resemble the lethal tentacles propelling the terrifying monster of the deep.
Fig.7
N.C. Wyeth, TheMysteriousIsland,AdventurewithaGiant Squid, 1939/1940, Oil on hardboard (Renaissance Panel), 30 1/16 x 20 1/2 inches
The Free Library of Philadelphia, Childrens Literature Research Collection
Copyright ©2020 N.C. Wyeth
Wyeth dedicated considerable segments of his work to painting myriad species of birds, as evident in this selection populated by chickens, ravens in The Thief, 1996 (Cat. 16), purple martins in Gourd, 1994 (Cat. 15), geese in the brilliant Goose Crossing, 2005 (Cat. 19), and gulls. Beginning with these series dating from the 1990s, GullsofMonhegan,#1, 1992, and Urchin, 1999 (Cat. 17), lead the way in Wyeth’s practice to his personifications of gulls embodying TheSevenDeadlySins,
2005, ruthlessly scavenging gulls that inhabit his accompanying scene, Inferno, Monhegan, 2006 (Fig. 8), and terrifying gulls heading directly for us in his 20-foot high CarneyBanners, 2009, painted to accompany the exhibition at the Farnsworth Art Museum and Adelson Galleries.
It is hard to believe that Wyeth invited seagulls into his Monhegan studio as portrayed in GullsofMonhegan,#1. Yet he has often described how his desire to paint certain animals, like a wild ram he befriended, required persistence and time to win over the sitter shown in a profile that commands the view from Manana Island towards Monhegan in Islander, 1975. Gulls make themselves very much at home in his Monhegan studio, squawking and strutting on his patriotically-painted floors, crouching under the stretchers of a ladderback chair, and humorously balancing a webbed foot and talons next to the carved cabriole leg of Wyeth’s Chippendale table ending in a ball and claw foot.
Fig.8
Jamie Wyeth, Inferno,Monhegan, 2006, Enamel, gouache, and watercolor on archival cardboard, 60 x 80 inches (detail) Private Collection
Urchin, 1999, belongs to subsequent series of gulls, inspired by their daily habits, whether nesting, as in Run, 1999, or in this composition, harvesting a meal from the sea. Recalling the profile silhouettes of American weathervanes, one of many arrows in his quiver, Wyeth poses the gull in Urchin nearly filling the sheet of textured, handmade paper. For good measure, he scatters two smaller versions of gulls in the upper left, a nod to how many so-called folk or self-taught artists used diminishing scale to evoke perspective.
Wyeth went to great lengths to attract and study his favorite birds, just as he did during the 1970s, when sharks, shown here in an early watercolor, Shark, 1973 (Cat. 3), attracted his attention, inspiring him to construct a special tank to study them. Against the grey rocky shore, sparkling with white from scraping the paper, the shark in Wyeth’s sheet appears alive with the brilliant blue, stretching from his nose to his tail, with a flourish of the brush outlining the fin closest to us. In his determined pursuit of ravens, Wyeth has often recounted the tale of attracting them to Southern Island through his collaboration with raven expert, Bernd Heinrich. On Heinrich’s recommendation and with the help of the Maine Highway Department, the artist managed to procure a freshly-killed cow carcass to attract ravens, given their sharp beaks enabled them to pierce tough hide impermeable to other scavengers. Just as with gulls he would paint again and again, Wyeth has painted ravens on Southern Island and on Monhegan, in flocks, pairs, and solo, during all seasons of the year.
In The Thief, 1996, against a cloud-streaked, orange and yellow sky, a raven looms in profile close to us, proclaiming his capture of loot stolen from the artist himself: a pearl necklace; pocket watch; barber scissors; and even a tiny pearl-encircled, watercolor miniature of a lover’s eye, a miniature token of passion that Wyeth’s discerning connoisseur’s eye found worthy of his own personal collections. Left to supply our own narrative for what transpired, above the raven’s haul, Wyeth’s painted sky gleams more brilliantly than all the shiny objects arrayed on the rocks, even the jewel-framed eye from the brush of an unidentified artist.
One of the greatest strengths of Wyeth’s practice that continues to develop throughout his work is how light conveys mood and atmosphere so palpable it takes on its own personality. In the same year that Wyeth depicted the pile of carved wooden buoys seen through a dusty windowpane in Casket Rock, he turned his
attention outside to render a carefully stacked pile of hand-hewn firewood in Half Cord, 1974 (Cat. 5). Inspired by everyday life in Maine, both compositions reveal the artist considering the relationship of smaller pieces, carved lobster buoys or split logs, to the structure of the greater whole, all the while taking us along with him on his journey, guided by his distinctive play of light. In Casket Rock, the darkest tone in the composition appears both in the shadow of the buoy closest to us, and the painted markings on the buoys themselves, connecting Wyeth, the professional artist, with the professional fishermen who hand painted the floats for their traps. Half Cord offers a visual dance between light and shadow, as it plays across the surface of the length of the logs and the yellow tones of their end grains, building a structure that resembles small towers or the stacks of rocks like prehistoric cairns that dot the Monhegan paths and beach heads.
Reflecting Wyeth’s lifelong fascination with pumpkins that he drew as a three-year old in one of his earliest surviving drawings, PumpkinShadow, 1977, is a perfect match between his chosen watercolor medium and the shadow play he chooses to paint. Selecting a paper with a rough surface or “tooth,” Wyeth drags his brush over the barely visible peaks and valleys, leaving pigment on the tops and white paper untouched in the hollows beneath, thus simulating sunlight as it glints in and out of the rough granite rocks and deep crevasses. In contrast to the rotund, brilliant pumpkin, the shadows cast by the stem and the pumpkin itself are arresting. For the pumpkin, the shadow is not round at the left edge as one might expect from what we see perched above the rocky ledge; instead it traces a shape that suggests a human profile. The stem, casting a shadow on the rock closest to the viewer, resembles an upside-down, small winged creature or an extremely sharp pickaxe. As this the brilliant orange pumpkin signals Hallowe’en, a favorite holiday in the Wyeth family, the artist masks himself in these dark shadows, leaving his masquerade open to infinite interpretations by the viewer.
In Buttercups, 1994 (Cat. 14), a row of green, pumpkin-shaped gourds tumble along a simple wooden shelf supported by decorative brackets with delicate cutwork openings resembling lace. The energy of the tipping gourds animate the composition, as Wyeth’s rendering of shadows cast by the shelf brackets seem to come alive. Wyeth’s brush traces sunlight passing through the openings left by a woodworker’s jigsaw into a realm where ghostly fingers stretch along the wall, taking on the life of spirits, as they reach for a crack of brilliant sunlight creeping around the frame of a door.
Wyeth’s tour-de-force handling of light over the course of time and place is especially evident in Fog, 2000 (Cat. 18). The atmospheric quality of droplets suspended in light is palpable, as we feel we are enveloped by heavy mist highlighting the intense indigo of the iris the artist depicts from his low vantage point. The dark shapes of distant trees are diffuse, and our inability to discern their edges is disorienting. Wyeth traces fog shrouding the scene with a bold brush stroke of grey blue paint floating into the scene from the upper left. Only the acid green stems and the purple iris blossoms, some still tightly furled, are distinct, their brilliant color and tricorn shapes contrasting the amorphous specters of dark woods looming in the distance.
Light creates an entirely different mood in And the Cow Jumped..., 2007 (Cat. 20). The title takes us back to the familiar nursery rhyme that tells of an imaginary gathering of a cat and a fiddle, a laughing dog, a cow able to leap over the moon, and a dish that ran away with a spoon. In contrast to the title, viewed from behind, Wyeth’s cow contentedly contemplates the moon, resting with angled bovine hips and spine poking up at us. The scene recalls the unusual pose Wyeth used to great effect in his Portrait of Lincoln Kirstein, 1965 (Fig. 9). Posing the ballet impresario and prime mover of contemporary art from behind, Wyeth portrayed Kirstein fixated on a scene taking place beyond the frame of the composition, presumably on stage, opening up the scene to the viewer’s imagination. In thinking about how a child’s mind, sparked by nursery rhymes and fairy tales, is capable of transforming animals into all sorts
Fig.9
Jamie Wyeth, Portrait of Lincoln Kirstein, 1965, Oil on canvas, 38 1/2 x 29 inches
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; bequest of Lincoln Kirstein
of imaginary scenarios, Wyeth bathes his scene of AndtheCowJumped... in a lavender haze, painted with tight brushwork recalling N.C. Wyeth landscapes inspired by the Italian Impressionist he greatly admired, Giovanni Segantini (1858-1899). The early evening sky appears rubbed in from memory, transporting us to that milky dream world of childhood through glimmers of pale pinks, blues, lavenders, and yellow, and dissolving trees, cow, and grass into softened, soothing shapes that play out across the composition like a calming lullaby.
Fig.10
Jamie Wyeth, Nureyev–DonQuixote–YellowBackground, 2001, Charcoal, gouache, and watercolor on toned paper board, 47 3/4 x 36 inches
The most recent painting in the group, Kleberg: Squirreling, 2018, marks a new point of departure for Wyeth’s handling of light as his most evocative protagonist. Here we are confronted head-on with the gloating pose of one of his star canine sitters, golden Labrador Kleberg, whom Wyeth himself used as a canvas by regularly painting a black ring around his eye. Flung from Wyeth’s paint brush, right into the viewer’s face, searing white light streams from underneath the tree branches. We have seen Wyeth at work in this way through the course of his earlier Nureyev’s studies, both in the drips he used to animate the dancer’s face in the head and shoulder studies, and again when he depicts the ballet superstar as Nureyev–DonQuixote–YellowBackground, 2001 (Fig. 10), against freely applied paint and
Brandywine River Museum of Art, Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania
drips that are performative by both dancer and artist. We see this same practice in the sparks that fly around Inferno,Monhegan, with Wyeth captured on film by D’Arcy Marsh applying streaks of paint with the flexible bristle of a broom to suggest their potent and ephemeral qualities. Kleberg:Squirreling is a milestone in Wyeth’s remarkable journey as he continues to expand his application and facility with paint based on decades of practice and repetition. We see a greater sense of freedom, indeed a devil-may-care attitude, exceedingly well matched to a portrait of Kleberg, mouth wide open, contentedly relishing his own passionate pursuit of squirrels.
This select group of paintings by Jamie Wyeth, inspired by a collection formed over several decades by distinguished connoisseurs of his work, provides glimmers of the artist’s continuing exploration of the natural world, from the walnuts and apples bundled on a local Brandywine Farm to the domesticated gulls making themselves quite comfortable among the antique furnishings in his Monhegan studio. Along the way, as witness to bold and haunting shadows, beasts tamed and wild, and light that can be vivid and magical, Wyeth’s compositions display his masterful combinations of media, imagination, and striking contrasts. With all of the wonder, beauty and strangeness he commands, Wyeth transforms his experience of the natural world through his signature artistic alchemy, inviting new perspectives on our own humanity as just one small part of the teeming life that surrounds us.•
I Elliot Bostwick Davis with an essay by David Houston, JamieWyeth. Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 2014.
Cat. 1
AppleBags, 1962, a warm autumn scene of harvesting the fruits of farmers’ labors, a pursuit that may have intrigued an aspiring sixteen-yearold roaming the countryside for subjects that would support his own life as an artist. EBD
Cat. 2
Squid, 1970, belongs to a series of watercolors inspired by trees on Point Lookout Farm. Some resemble insects, such as BrandywineSpiders, 1970, which appeared in the MFA, Boston retrospective. In this sheet, the artist imagines a fallen branch as a giant underwater creature that starred in N.C Wyeth’s illustrations for TheMysteriousIsland, 1918, Jules Verne’s sequel to 20,000LeaguesUnder the Sea, created in his studio nearby. Thinly-painted, bare trees in the background highlight the bleached limbs of a fallen branch that appears, incongruously, to be swimming. An oval hollow transformed into an eye just where the branches fan out to resemble the lethal tentacles propelling the terrifying monster of the deep.
EBD
Cat. 3
Against the grey, rocky shore, sparkling with white from scraping the paper, the shark in Wyeth’s sheet appears alive with the brilliant blue, stretching from his nose to tail, with a flourish of the brush outlining the fin closest to us. Wyeth went to great lengths to attract and study his favorite birds, just as he did during the 1970s, when sharks, shown here in an early watercolor, Shark, 1973, attracted his attention, inspiring him to construct a special tank to study them. EBD
Cat. 4
In a view on Monhegan Island, Casket Rock depicts a shed with a vertical window mullion, which boldly divides the upper composition into halves, a stroke of brilliant abstraction that effectively frames the distant view of the bulging rock in the distance resembling a burial casket. Wyeth calls our attention to the pile of lobster buoys tossed onto the floor at odd angles. As we cast our eyes to the lower edge of the sheet, we realize the horizontal window mullion has found its way into the scene with the trace of the artist’s brush forming a shadow crossed by diagonals of thinner and fainter strokes tracing the floorboards. Exploring relationships between light and dark, it is classic Wyeth at work, showing us with his brush the light we can see for ourselves in the actual window mullion, as well as the shadow cast by a mullion we cannot. EBD
In the same year that Wyeth depicted the pile of carved wooden buoys seen through a dusty windowpane in Casket Rock, he turned his attention outside to render a carefully stacked pile of hand-hewn firewood in Half Cord. Inspired by everyday life in Maine, both compositions reveal the artist considering the relationship of smaller pieces, carved lobster buoys or split logs, to the structure of the greater whole, all the while taking us along with him on his journey, guided by his distinctive play of light. In Casket Rock, the darkest tone in the composition appears both in the shadow of the buoy closest to us, and the painted markings on the buoys themselves, connecting Wyeth, the professional artist, with the professional fishermen who hand painted the floats for their traps. Half Cord offers a visual dance between light and shadow, as it plays across the surface of the length of the logs and the yellow tones of their end grains, building a structure that resembles small towers or the stacks of rocks like prehistoric cairns that dot the Monhegan paths and beach heads. EBD
Cat. 6
PumpkinShadow, 1977, is a perfect match between Wyeth’s chosen watercolor medium and the shadow play he chooses to paint. Selecting a paper with a rough surface or “tooth,” the artist drags his brush over the barely visible peaks and valleys, leaving pigment on the tops and white paper untouched in the hollows beneath, thus simulating sunlight as it glints in and out of the rough granite rocks and deep crevasses. In contrast to the rotund, brilliant pumpkin, the shadows cast by the stem and the pumpkin itself are arresting. For the pumpkin, the shadow is not round at the left edge as one might expect from what we see perched above the rocky ledge; instead it traces a shape that suggests a human profile. The stem, casting a shadow on the rock closest to the viewer, resembles an upside-down, small winged creature or an extremely sharp pickaxe. As this the brilliant orange pumpkin signals Hallowe’en, a favorite holiday in the Wyeth family, the artist masks himself in these dark shadows, leaving his masquerade open to infinite interpretations by the viewer. EBD
Cat. 7
Jump offers us the opportunity to witness Wyeth’s ability to turn an inanimate object into a portrait. The trunk of an old tree has been chopped down at its base, and while most of the lumber has been taken away, the lower section lies where it had fallen to take on a new role as a horse jump. Light and shadows ripple across it, as if they were bouncing off wrinkles of skin. The white posts and bar dress the log, as if they were a garment wrapped around its shoulders and identifies the sullen dead tree with an esteemed new purpose. Adam Adelson
Cat. 8
In Yolk and the Wicker Chair, 1987, the white wicker chair allows the artist to trace all manner of curlicues, balls, and twists that form its structure, creating something substantial as Wyeth bends his combined media to his vision of how simple willow branches are transformed to become wicker. The tightness of the wicker designs plays off the background and floor. We see Wyeth letting go of paint in every direction, as he drips, dabs, and swishes it broadly around the silky fur of the seated Jack Russell Terrier, named Yolk. Known for his sensitive and charming images of all kinds of dogs, but especially his own, Yolk, in Wyeth’s realm, has all the presence of a Renaissance profile portrait of a condottieri, seated on the artist’s painstakingly-crafted wicker throne. EBD
Cat. 9
Oven Stuffers dates from a period in Wyeth’s career when he produced numerous scenes of chickens and roosters strutting before or sitting inside various cardboard boxes printed with brand names like S.O.S., Tide, 10 W 30, 1981, or Corn Flakes, 1985. This time around, he plays the black feathers off against the lighter grey tones of the barn wall, and the white feathers against darker brown tones. One chicken crouches into the belly of the scale, baring a profile surrounded by a profusion of straw, while the other stares at us with beady eyes head on, seemingly beseeching us as to whether we would really want to see this chicken with such a formidable personality on our dinner table. EBD
Cat. 10
Cow and the Cat, 1988, visibly embodies Wyeth’s fascination with animating inanimate objects and painting animals with personalities, while also revealing his love of American folk art, especially weathervanes that he collects. A metal weathervane painted to resemble a black and white Holstein cow in profile stares out with a glinting, tin eye. This single eye contrasts head-on stare of a crouching cat, facing us with golden eyes like antique glass marbles, recalling the piercing blue eyes of HelenTaussig, 1963, behind her cat eye glasses, or the yellow eyes of Lady, 1968. Although fashioned from molded tin and painted, a weathervane from Wyeth’s brush resembles a real Holstein cow, standing in profile as though waiting at a stanchion during milking time. In contrast, the thinly-painted cat gives the impression that the live animal nearby is merely a fleeting apparition. By grounding both animals on the top of a red-painted pine chest with a visible key hole worn from use, Wyeth calls attention to painting. He pushes to the front of the composition an object that is the handiwork of another artist, just as he did with painted lobster buoys in Casket Rock, inviting us to enjoy the care he lavishes on repainting the red folk art chest right before our eyes. EBD
The whimsical Gourd Tree is caught in a breeze that has released many of its pink and white petals into the air and onto the ground around its feet. The dark clouds in the sliver of blue sky at the top of the composition suggest a storm is coming or has passed. The bark is fettered with various shadows from the recently budded leaves, projected by the light that shines through the clouds above. The holes in the yellow gourds indicate that a few birds have found shelter inside the hard-shelled fruits of the tree, and perhaps are waiting for the wind to stop. Adam Adelson
It is hard to believe that Wyeth invited seagulls into his Monhegan studio as portrayed in GullsofMonhegan, #1. Yet he has often described how his desire to paint certain animals, like a wild ram he befriended, required persistence and time to win over the sitter shown in a profile that commands the view from Manana Island towards Monhegan in Islander, 1975. Gulls make themselves very much at home in his Monhegan studio, squawking and strutting on his patriotically-painted floors, crouching under the stretchers of a ladderback chair, and humorously balancing a webbed foot and talons next to the carved cabriole leg of Wyeth’s Chippendale table ending in a ball and claw foot. EBD
Cat. 13
In Mousing, Wyeth places a simple pail front and center against the shallow space of a barn wall rendered in looselybrushed, dark green tones that initially camouflage a black cat, poised to hunt. He opens a metal grate for us at the left, a sliced view onto lush, acid green foliage lit from above, juxtaposing the brilliant, painterly touches used to paint leaves in nature and the sheer, deep greens of manmade, corrugated tin inside the barn. The artist plays cat and mouse with the viewer, building up horizontals of the windowsill, the ridges and rim of the pail, and latch above the cat, and then countering them with verticals of the rippled background, the angle of the open grate, and the cat’s raised paws. Animate and inanimate objects respond to one another in Wyeth’s world. We discover the handle of the pail and the cat’s body tilt at the same angle in hopes of capturing prey, as the hunt for a mouse causes us to become engaged in his scene found in one small corner of life on Point Lookout Farm. EBD
Cat. 14
In Buttercups, 1994, a row of green, pumpkinshaped gourds tumble along a simple wooden shelf supported by decorative brackets with delicate, cutwork openings resembling lace. The energy of the tipping gourds animate the composition, as Wyeth’s rendering of shadows cast by the shelf brackets seem to come alive. Wyeth’s brush traces sunlight passing through the openings left by a woodworker’s jigsaw into a realm where ghostly fingers stretch along the wall, taking on the life of spirits, as they reach for a crack of brilliant sunlight creeping around the frame of a door. EBD
Cat.
In Gourd, Wyeth creates harmony between an irregularly shaped “birdhouse gourd” and the tree that created it within a spiral, Golden Ratio (used by artists for centuries to create an aesthetically-pleasing balance between the weight of subjects in a painting). The composition spins out from the blue bird who rests at her doorway, around the perimeter of the gourd’s shell, to the budding branch, enclosing the negative space of the brilliant blue sky – mimicking a yin-yang symbol. Looking closely at the painting, we can see the artist’s fingerprints. Wyeth is known to use his hands and whatever other tools necessary to create the desired effect. One suspects that he frantically worked through the application of wet paint to capture this brief moment of the gourd’s owner peeking out of her home. Adam Adelson
Cat.
In The Thief, 1996, against a cloud-streaked, orange and yellow sky, a raven looms in profile close to us, proclaiming his capture of loot stolen from the artist himself: a pearl necklace; pocket watch; barber scissors; and even a tiny pearlencircled, watercolor miniature of a lover’s eye, a miniature token of passion that Wyeth’s discerning connoisseur’s eye has found worthy of his own personal collections. Left to supply our own narrative for what transpired, above the raven’s haul, Wyeth’s painted sky gleams more brilliantly than all the shiny objects arrayed on the rocks, even the jewel-framed eye from the brush of an unidentified artist. EBD
Cat. 17
Urchin, 1999, belongs to subsequent series of gulls, inspired by their daily habits, whether nesting, as in Run, 1999, or in this composition, harvesting a meal from the sea. Recalling the profile silhouettes of American weathervanes, one of many arrows in his quiver, Wyeth poses the gull in Urchin nearly filling the sheet of textured, handmade paper. For good measure, he scatters two smaller versions of gulls in the upper left, a nod to how many so-called folk or self-taught artists used diminishing scale to evoke perspective. EBD
Cat. 18
Wyeth’s tour-de-force handling of light over the course of time and place is especially evident in Fog, 2000. The atmospheric quality of droplets suspended in light is palpable, as we feel we are enveloped by heavy mist highlighting the intense indigo of the iris the artist depicts from his low vantage point. The dark shapes of distant trees are diffuse, and our inability to discern their edges is disorienting. Wyeth traces fog shrouding the scene with a bold brush stroke of grey blue paint floating into the scene from the upper left. Only the acid green stems and the purple iris blossoms, some still tightly furled, are distinct, their brilliant color and tricorn shapes contrasting the amorphous specters of dark woods looming in the distance. EBD
Cat. 19
In his 1863 renowned essay, The Painter of Modern Life, Charles Baudelaire used the term flâneur, “observer of life,” to describe the Impressionist painters of the day who recorded busy street scenes and portrayed people carrying on in their daily lives. Wyeth is a modern day flâneur of animals. In Goose Crossing, he cleverly personifies the pig with an expression that anyone can relate to, as she waits for the line of geese to pass. The pig turns her head slightly away from the light and towards the viewer, as if to find recompense for her patience. Meanwhile, the birds cross in groups, gossiping to each other as they pass. Adam Adelson
Light creates an entirely different mood in And the Cow Jumped..., 2007. The title takes us back to the familiar nursery rhyme that tells of an imaginary gathering of a cat and a fiddle, a laughing dog, a cow able to leap over the moon, and a dish that ran away with a spoon. In contrast to the title, viewed from behind, Wyeth’s cow contentedly contemplates the moon, resting with angled bovine hips and spine poking up at us. The scene recalls the unusual pose Wyeth used to great effect in his Portrait of Lincoln Kirstein, 1965. Posing the ballet impresario and prime mover of contemporary art from behind, Wyeth portrayed Kirstein fixated on a scene taking place beyond the frame of the composition, presumably on stage, opening up the scene to the viewer’s imagination. In thinking about how a child’s mind, sparked by nursery rhymes and fairy tales, is capable of transforming animals into all sorts of imaginary scenarios, Wyeth bathes his scene of AndtheCowJumped... in a lavender haze, painted with tight brushwork recalling N.C. Wyeth landscapes inspired by the Italian Impressionist he greatly admired, Giovanni Segantini (1858-1899). The early evening sky appears rubbed in from memory, transporting us to that milky dream world of childhood through glimmers of pale pinks, blues, lavenders, and yellow, and dissolving trees, cow, and grass into softened, soothing shapes that play out across the composition like a calming lullaby. EBD
In Black and White Goat, 2008, Wyeth fills the composition from edge to edge with the goat’s curving horns and wild coat, relishing painting strands of black fleece that take on a life of their own as they merge together, forming the outlines of the goat’s front and hind quarters, which, in turn, frame a fluffy, white midsection. With Wyeth’s brush, the goat’s belly becomes an imaginative display of texture and paint that is truly tantalizing, a return to his earlier painting of black-faced sheep named Lady, 1968, that he portrayed standing above the horizon of Monhegan, in a composition that was said to be a favorite of Andrew Wyeth. In Lady, the black oval shape of the sheep’s face displays two black ears jutting out to echo the horizon and yellow eyes like giant marbles fixed on us. Together they resemble a mask, detached from the profusion of curly locks painted so thickly they resemble unkempt, Rastafarian dreads. In Black and White Goat, Wyeth plays with the lighter tones pulling away from the canvas before our eyes, as the downy white fur floats freely above the dark front and hind quarters of the goat. The light midsection lifts away from the green background that Wyeth drops down like a curtain for a shallow stage to keep our attention focused on his riotous handling of what initially appears to be an ordinary black and white goat. EBD
Kleberg:Squirreling, 2018, marks a new point of departure for Wyeth’s handling of light as his most evocative protagonist. Here we are confronted head-on with the gloating pose of one of his star canine sitters, golden Labrador Kleberg, whom Wyeth himself used as a canvas by regularly painting a black ring around his eye. Flung from Wyeth’s paint brush, right into the viewer’s face, searing white light streams from underneath the tree branches. We have seen Wyeth at work in this way through the course of his earlier Nureyev’s studies, both in the drips he used to animate the dancer’s face in the head and shoulder studies, 1977, and again when he depicts the ballet superstar as Nureyev–DonQuixote–Yellow Background, 2001, against freely applied paint and drips that are performative by both dancer and artist. We see this same practice in the sparks that fly around Inferno,Monhegan, 2006, with Jamie captured on film by D’Arcy Marsh applying streaks of paint with the flexible bristle of a broom to suggest their potent and ephemeral qualities. Kleberg:Squirreling is a milestone in Wyeth’s remarkable journey as he continues to expand his application and facility with paint based on decades of practice and repetition. We see a greater sense of freedom, indeed a devil-may-care attitude, exceedingly well matched to a portrait of Kleberg, mouth wide open, contentedly relishing his own passionate pursuit of squirrels. EBD
2016 Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid, Spain, 3/1/16 - 6/6/16, Wyeth: Andrew and Jamie in the Studio
2015 - 2016 Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO, 11/8/15 - 2/7/16, Wyeth: Andrew and Jamie in the Studio
2015 Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR, 7/23/1510/5/15, JamieWyeth
2015 San Antonio Museum of Art, San Antonio, TX, 4/25/15 - 7/5/15, Jamie Wyeth
2015 Brandywine River Museum, Chadds Ford, PA, 1/17/15 - 4/5/15, Jamie Wyeth
2014 - 2015 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA, 7/16/14 - 1/5/15, Jamie Wyeth
2013 Shelburne Museum, Shelburne, VT, 6/22/13 - 10/27/13, WyethVertigo
2013 Brandywine River Museum, Chadds Ford, PA, 6/15/13 - 11/17/13, JamieWyeth,RockwellKentand Monhegan
2013 Greenville County Museum of Art, Greenville, SC, 2/6/13 - 4/21/13, Jamie Wyeth,RockwellKentandMonhegan
2012 Farnsworth Art Musuem, Rockland, ME, 5/10/12 - 12/30/12, Jamie Wyeth,RockwellKentandMonhegan
2011 - 2012 The Mona Bismarck Museum, Paris, France, 11/7/112/11/12, TheWyeths:ThreeGenerations of Art
2011 Brandywine River Museum, Chadds Ford, PA, 6/11/11 - 9/11/11, FarmWorkbyJamieWyeth
2011 Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, Kalamazoo, MI, 1/15/11 - 4/17/11, The Wyeths:America’sArtists
2010 - 2011 Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, OK, 12/19/2010 - 3/20/2011, TheWyethLegacy:CowanCollection Paintings
2010 - 2011 Farnsworth Art Musuem, Rockland, ME, 5/15/10 - 1/2/11, Wyeth’s Wyeths
2010 Meredith Long and Company, Houston, TX, 10/22/10 - 11/20/10, Jamie WyethPaintings
2010 Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, 6/9/10 - 8/22/10, TheWyethFamily: Three Generations of American Art
2010 Nassau Art Musuem, Long Island, NY, 5/29/10 - 9/12/10, The Sea Around Us
2010 Salt Lake City Art Center, Salt Lake City, UT, 1/27/10 - 5/22/10, Jamie Wyeth:TheSevenDeadlySins
2009 Wyeth Center at the Farnsworth Museum, Rockland, ME, 5/16/098/31/09, JamieWyeth:SevenDeadly Sins
2009 Brandywine River Museum, Chadds Ford, PA, 9/12/09 - 11/30/09, JamieWyeth:SevenDeadlySins
2009 Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO, 9/17/0911/28/09, Wyeth:ThreeGenerationsof Artistry
2008 Adelson Galleries, New York, NY, 3/14/08 - 4/18/08, JamieWyeth:Seven DeadlySinsandRecentWorks
2007 - 2008 Wyeth Center at the Farnsworth Museum, Rockland, ME, 9/8/07 - 5/18/08, JamesWyeth:Selected Works
2007 Ogunquit Museum of American Art, Ogunquit, ME, 7/1/07 - 8/21/07, JamieWyeth:Paintings
2007 Leigh Yawkey Woodson Museum, Wausau, WI, 6/15/07 - 8/26/07, Jamie Wyeth:Birds
2007 Brandywine River Museum, Chadds Ford, PA, 6/8/07 - 9/3/07, Dog DaysofSummer:WorksbyJamieWyeth
2007 Wyeth Center at the Farnsworth Museum, Rockland, ME, 4/30/078/30/07, FactoryWork:Warhol,Wyeth andBasquiat
2007 McNay Museum of Art, San Antonio, TX, 1/16/07 - 4/8/07, Factory Work:Warhol,WyethandBasquiat
2006 Brandywine River Museum, Chadds Ford, PA, 9/8/06 - 11/19/06, FactoryWork:Warhol,Wyethand Basquiat
2006 Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO, 6/2/06 - 9/3/06, CapturingNureyev:JamesWyethPaints the Dancer
2006 Wyeth Center at the Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, ME, 5/15/0610/15/06, JamesWyeth:Portraitofan Artist
2006 Brandywine River Museum, Chadds Ford, PA, 4/1/06 - Summer ’06, JamieWyeth’sBirds
2006 Wyeth Center at the Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, ME, 2/4/0605/06, JamesWyeth:SelectedWorks
2006 Naples Museum of Art, Naples, FL, 1/21/06 - 5/14/06, TheWyeths
2005 Adelson Galleries, New York, NY, 10/25/05 - 11/26/05, Gulls,Ravens,and aVulture:TheOrnithologicalPaintingsof JamesWyeth
2005 Wyeth Center at the Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, ME, 6/26/0510/10/05, Gulls,Ravens,andaVulture: TheOrnithologicalPaintingsofJames Wyeth
2003 Wyeth Center at the Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, ME, 1/19/03 - 6/1/03, JamesWyeth:Portraitsand Landscapes
2003 Brandywine River Museum, Chadds Ford, PA, 1/18/03 - 5/18/03, CapturingNureyev:JamesWyethPaints the Dancer
2002 - 2003 Wyeth Center at the Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, ME, 6/9/02 - 1/5/03, CapturingNureyev: JamesWyethPaintstheDancer
2002 New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at the Lincoln Center, 3/22/02 - 5/25/02, CapturingNureyev: JamesWyethPaintstheDancer
2002 The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, 2/7/02 - 3/10/02, CapturingNureyev:JamesWyethPaints the Dancer
2001 - 2002 Wyeth Center at the Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, ME, 5/14/01 - 05/26/02, The Maine Influence: SelectedWorksbyJamesWyeth
2001 Wyeth Center at the Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, ME, 1/14/015/13/01, The Maine Influence: Selected WorksbyJamesWyeth
2001 - 2002 Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota, FL, 10/11/01 - 1/6/02, One Nation: Patriots and Pirates
2001 Brandywine River Museum, Chadds Ford, PA, 6/2/01 - 9/3/01, One Nation: Patriots and Pirates
2001 New Britain Museum of American Art, New Britain, CT, 2/15/01 - 4/30/01, One Nation: Patriots and Pirates
2001 Russell Rotunda, Capitol Building, Washington, DC, 1/14/01 - 1/21/01, One Nation: Patriots and Pirates
2000 - 2001 Wyeth Center at the Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, ME, 8/12/00 - 1/1/01, One Nation: Patriots and Pirates
2000 James Graham and Sons, 1014 Madison Ave, NY, NY, 11/2/00 - 12/2/00, AmericaonPaper:Perspectiveson PeopleandPlacesbyAmericanMasters
2000 Wyeth Center at the Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, ME, 5/13/008/6/00, Monhegan
1999 - 2000 Wyeth Center at the Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, ME, 10/99 - 5/7/00, Paintings,Props,and Costumes:ObjectsofInspiration
1999 - 2002 NASA/American Museum in Motion, 7/99 - 2002, Art Train(42-MonthTrainTourto120 Communities)
1999 - 2000 Butler Museum of American Art, Youngstown, OH, 3/16/99 - 4/18/00, CabbagesandKings
1999 - 2000 James Graham and Sons, New York, NY, 12/2/99 - 1/15/00, Dead CatMuseum,MonheganIslandandOther Recent Works
1999 Wyeth Center at the Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, ME, 5/29/9910/17/99, ACenturyofWyeths
1998 - 1999 Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington, DE, 12/10/98 - 2/21/99, WondrousStrange
1998 Wyeth Center at the Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, ME, 6/21/9811/8/98, WondrousStrange
1998 The Speed Art Museum, Louisville, KY, 6/2/98 - 8/16/98, Wyeth Three Generations
1998 Marietta / Cobb Museum of Art, Marietta, GA, 2/3/98 - 5/3/98, The Wyeths:N.C.,AndrewandJamie
1998 Brandywine River Museum, Chadds Ford, PA, 1/24/98 - 3/29/98, N.C. WyethandHisGrandson:ALegacy
1997 Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, IL, 6/28/97 - 10/26/97, N.C. WyethandHisGrandson:ALegacy
1996 Double Door Gallery, Islesboro, ME, 8/3/96 - 8/10/96, (JamesGraham& Sons)ImagesofMaine
1995 James Graham & Sons, New York, NY, 11/16/95 - 12/21/95, IslandLight
1995 The Carriage House of Decatur House, Washington, DC, 10/31/9511/14/95, IslandLight
1993 James Graham & Sons, New York, NY, 9/11/93 - 10/9/93, JamieWyeth: Islands
1993 Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, ME, 06/93 - 8/22/93, Jamie Wyeth:Islands
1990 Coe Kerr Gallery, Inc., New York, NY, 11/10/90 - 12/1/90, JamieWyeth Oils,MixedMediasandWatercolors
1988 Coe Kerr Gallery, Inc., New York, NY, 11/18/88 - 12/22/88, JamieWyeth Recent Works
1988 Brandywine River Museum, Chadds Ford, PA, 9/17/88 - 11/22/88, An American Vision Three Generations of WyethArt
1988 Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, England, 7/12/88 - 8/29/88, An American Vision Three Generations of WyethArt
1988 Palazzo Reale, Milan, Italy, 5/17/88 - 6/20/88, An American Vision ThreeGenerationsofWyethArt
1988 Sciagaya Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan, 3/10/88 - 4/21/88, An American VisionThreeGenerationsofWyethArt
1987 - 1988 Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, IL, 12/13/87 - 2/14/88, An American Vision Three Generations of WyethArt
1987 Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX, 9/29/87 - 11/29/87, An American Vision ThreeGenerationsofWyethArt
1987 Coreoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, 7/4/87 - 8/30/87, An American Vision Three Generations of WyethArt
1987 Academy of the Arts of the USSR, Moscow, 4/24/87 - 5/31/87, An American VisionThreeGenerationsofWyethArt
1987 Academy of the Arts of the USSR, Leningrad, 3/11/87 - 5/31/87, An American Vision Three Generations of WyethArt
1986 Hall Galleries Inc., Dallas, TX, 4/7/86 - 5/12/86, JamieWyeth:New Works
1985 - 1986 Amot Art Museum, Elmira, NY, 12/7/85 - 2/23/86, Three GenerationsofWyeth
1985 Montgomery Gallery, San Francisco, CA, 4/10/85 - 5/18/85, Jamie WyethSpecialWorks
1984 - 1985 Oklahoma Art Center, Oklahoma City, OK, 11/30/84 - 1/20/85, JamieWyeth:AnAmericanView
1984 Columbia Museum, Columbia, SC, 9/16/84 - 11/11/84, JamieWyeth:An American View
1984 Portland Museum of Art, Portland, ME, 6/19/84 - 9/9/84, JamieWyeth:An American View
1984 Coe Kerr Gallery, New York, NY, 5/2/84 - 5/24/84, JamieWyethRecent Works
1984 North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, NC, 2/4/84 - 4/1/84, Howard PyleandtheWyeths:FourGenerationsof AmericanImagination
1983 - 1984 Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, Montgomery, CA, 11/12/83 - 1/2/84, HowardPyleandtheWyeths: Four Generations of American Imagination
1983 Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Memphis, TN, 9/1/83 - 10/23/83, Howard PyleandtheWyeths:FourGenerationsof AmericanImagination
1983 Artique Ltd. Fine Art Gallery, Anchorage, AK, 3/11/83 - 4/11/83, Jamie WyethinAlaskaExhibitionofOriginal PaintingsandEtchings
1983 Alaska State Museum, Juneau, AK, 4/22/83 - 5/1/83, JamieWyethin Alaska
1983 University of Alaska Museum, Fairbanks, AK, 4/1/83 - 4/17/83, Jamie WyethinAlaska
1983 Anchorage Fine Arts Museum, Anchorage, AK, 3/13/83 - 3/27/83, JamieWyethinAlaska
1981 Amon Carter Museum of Western Art, Fort Worth, TX, 4/23/81 - 6/7/81, JamieWyeth
1981 Greenville County Museum of Art, Greenville, SC, 1/17/81 - 3/29/81, Jamie Wyeth
1980 Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA, 9/19/8012/14/80, JamieWyeth
1978 Columbus Gallery of Fine Arts, 01/78, JamieWyethRecentPaintings
1977 Coe Kerr Gallery, New York, NY, 11/10/77 - 12/3/77, JamesWyethRecent Paintings
1976 Coe Kerr Gallery, New York, NY, 6/3/76 - 7/9/76, AndyWarhol&Jamie WyethPortraitsofEachOther
1975 - 1976 Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, NE, 11/16/75 - 1/18/76, JamesWyeth
1974 - 1975 Brandywine River Museum, Chadds Ford, PA, 11/29/74 - 1/5/75, JamesWyethRecentPaintings
1974 Coe Kerr Gallery, New York, NY 11/7/74 - 11/25/74, JamesWyethRecent Paintings
1971 Brandywine River Museum, Chadds Ford, 6/18/71 - 10/31/71, The BrandywineHeritage
1969 Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, ME, 7/11/69 - 9/8/69, Oils, Watercolors,DrawingsbyJamesWyeth
1966 M. Knoedler & Co., New York, NY, 11/29/66 - 12/23/66, JamesWyeth Painting Exhibitionhistorycourtesyof www.JamieWyeth.com
Brandywine River Museum, Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania
Cheekwood Botanical Gardens and Museum of Art, Nashville, Tennessee
Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas
Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington Fine Arts Museums, San Francisco
Greenville County Museum of Art, Greenville, South Carolina
Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, Nebraska
Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Missouri Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Museum of Modern Art, New York
National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC
Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago
William A. Farnsworth Library and Art Museum, Rockland, Maine
Jamie and Friends at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, July 2015
